Digest 11/23/2020

Online communities and Substack, the Vox exodus, and more.

ONLINE COMMUNITIES AND THE NEWSLETTER BOOM

We are seeing a mass migration to Substack and Patreon, the reasons for which have been explored ad nauseam: the internet is increasingly persona-based; traditional jobs at digital media outlets are increasingly unreliable; and Substack has done a great job of attracting talent with money and benefits. A less-discussed but significant dynamic driving the trend, I think, is a desire among media consumers to feel part of an online community — a desire that has shaped digital media since the dawn of the internet, newsletters representing the latest manifestation. 

Before the newsletter boom, there were blogs. For example, The Toast — the beloved humor site founded by Nicole Cliffe and Daniel Lavery — fostered a vibrant community in its comments section. A 2017 Vice piece on the site’s rise and fall documented the growth of the site’s community of readers and commenters who called themselves “Toasties,” and found as much of the site’s value resided in the comments section as in the published content itself. “Over time it became more about the community,” Toastie Kristen Hicks told Vice. “It was a comfort zone to hang out in whenever things in my life were bad and just a nice place to be when things were good.”

Writer Anne Helen Petersen, who recently left her job as culture writer at BuzzFeed to launch her paid Substack Culture Study, used to write for The Toast and The Hairpin, and told me that many of her current readers can be traced back to those days. Others have been following her since she kept a WordPress blog roughly a decade ago; others have been part of her Facebook page, which has 44,000 members but maybe 5,000 regularly active participants, for nearly a decade. In short, being a fan of Petersen herself has become something of an online community — and she feels a genuine communal spirit with her loyal readers. 

“I know their names or their online names,” she told me. “I’ve met dozens of them in person at book events. Some have migrated over to the Substack community, which is a bit different in character than the Facebook page but, most importantly, is characterized by people who want to have conversations with each other in a way that doesn’t make them feel like shit…No trolls, no assholes, and if you disagree with something, talk about it.”

The community — in addition to providing a gathering place for readers bound by a shared interest — serves as a “comfort zone,” in the words of Toastie Kristen Hicks. The internet is vast, and large platforms have failed to shield users from harassment, hate speech, and trolling as they’ve grown; it’s nearly impossible to have a productive exchange on a public forum like, say, Twitter without fending off or muting such intrusions. A “comfort zone” on the internet provides a group of people who all want to be there, who are all bound together by a shared interest or common purpose, and are more inclined to treat one another charitably, even in disagreement. 

In my conversations with journalists who have flocked to Substack, many have cited this a plus. Judd Legum, author of politics newsletter Popular Information, noted the likelihood of facing trolls or bad-faith criticism was far less if your audience consists of people who have paid subscriptions to get your take in their inbox every week. “It sort of makes you feel better about what you’re doing,” he told me.

The persona-based online community isn’t necessarily new: The Toast revolved around Cliffe and Lavery, who remain beloved internet personalities both together and apart; over the past decade, creator fandom has also become a powerful force in fields like gaming, makeup, and entertainment. With solo newsletters, of course, it is a bit more explicit that readers are seeking a connection to a specific creator. In the highest subscription tier to Cat Marnell’s newly launched Patreon, Beautyshambles, she offers readers her direct line: “For $17 a month, you get everything else in the other tiers AND I will call you once a month,” she writes. “We will build an intimate long-term relationship accordingly.” In her most recent newsletter (I’m a subscriber, though not at the phone call tier), Marnell cited a phone call with a “chic Los-Angeles based Beautyshambles reader” who informed her that art dealer Larry Gagosian’s skin is “radiant” and “youthful.” The community feeds the content! 

(I can’t help but be a little amused that legacy media outlets like the New York Times are essentially trying to replicate what makes these smaller, more intimate corners of the internet so attractive in their own quest to amass subscribers and revenue. The Times has touted its comments sections and online communities, which include Facebook groups where readers can gather for lively discussions. And to the Times’ credit, whatever they’re doing is working — the paper recently hit 7 million subscribers.)

I asked Petersen if she felt the current newsletter boom had anything to do with a desire to be a part of a community. “Absolutely positively unequivocally one hundred percent,” she said — but added that the phenomenon is larger than the newsletter boom. “I honestly think the same impulse is behind the rise of Twitter prompts: it’s a way of having a conversation that evades the normal toxicity of public social media,” she said. 

“I think a lot of people ask themselves: would I pay $5 a month to have a space online where I can talk to people and get and share recommendations and don’t have to worry about someone calling me a whore, or advertising baby clothes, or tracking my digital footprint? Sign me up.”

EVERYTHING ELSE

— The mass exodus at Vox continues, as does the Times’ gradual absorption of every big name talent in the industry. Just about a week after Matt Yglesias announced he was leaving the news site Vox (which he helped found) for Substack, his co-founder Ezra Klein has announced that he’s leaving the site as well, to join the Times as a columnist and podcast host. Vox editor-in-chief and senior vice president Lauren Williams is also leaving the site to launch a nonprofit startup called Capital B, which she will use to create a news outlet geared towards Black readers.

— Governor Andrew Cuomo will receive an Emmy award for using television to “calm people” during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still very much happening and in fact is undergoing a resurgence in New York state. Cuomo also got a book deal to document his lessons in leading the state through the pandemic — which, once again, is still happening.

— Jonah Peretti has made good on his promise from 2018 to scale BuzzFeed by merging with other media companies. This past week he bought HuffPost for that very reason (scale). He also pitched the newly combined media company as something of an answer to the New York Times, which he argues cannot really be the paper of record while being subscription based (catered to a specific audience, paywalled). BuzzFeed/HuffPost, on the other hand, will be free and ad-based. As for whether everyone at HuffPost will get to keep their jobs in the merger, he’s not making any promises.

— The Los Angeles Times continues to refuse to pay restaurant critic Patricia Escárcega the same as her white male colleague, claiming that her colleague is paid more because he has more experience and has won significant awards. A source at the paper tells me a lot of staffers are upset about Escárcega’s treatment and feel it contradicts some pledges the paper has made about improving in terms of diversity.

— Snapchat has launched a program called Spotlight (lol??) that gives money to content creators for popular or “most entertaining” snaps. Spotlight will also have its very own feed, similar to TikTok, where users can view the content catered to their viewing habits.

— Fox News has fallen out of favor with Republicans since the election, when the network infuriated Trump loyalists by calling Arizona for Joe Biden. And since the election, conservative network Newsmax — which has not yet called the race for Biden — has ballooned in popularity. Trump supporters are increasingly burrowing into an alternate reality, it seems, with the help of new outlets and social networks to replace the ones they think are either lying to them or censoring them (the app Parler, for instance, has replaced Facebook for conservatives who feel the tech giant is silencing their views).